Why it’s here
The family’s record was spread across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, a travel blog, genealogy sites, recordings and boxes of prints. Any of those can vanish when a company changes its mind or a basement floods. This is where the family keeps its own copy. The other places can go on showing pieces of it.
What’s in it
- The family behind us. The Kjemhus line in Norway’s NumedalNumedal A long valley in southern Norway, running north-west from Kongsberg, where Flesberg, Rollag and Veggli lie. Numedal and its farms → valley, the McGregors from 1659, the Amoths from Trøgstad to a North Dakota homestead, and the Holloways of Mississippi. Every family that marries in is another line. Start with the family →
- The stories. My father Pete’s memoir and recordings, and whatever else the family tells. Stories →
- Our lives now. The Journal, which goes back to December 2008, starting with Planet Posts, the travel writing Bev and I do together.
The last one will be most of the site before long, and that’s on purpose. Today’s journal entry is what a great-grandchild will read the way we read Pete’s memoir now.
Who it’s for
Our kids and theirs, first. Then cousins, the close ones and the ones we haven’t met yet, in North Dakota or in Norway. Then anyone researching the same names. The curious are welcome to read along.
How we get it right
Everything here about the past should be able to answer “says who?” The answers come from Norway’s farm histories and its national archive, from census returns, death certificates and old North Dakota newspapers, and from what the family wrote down itself. I use AI to do much of the digging. It searches records in English and Norwegian and covers more ground than I ever could by hand. It can also be confidently wrong, so nothing goes on this site on its word. Every fact names its source, and where the records run out, the page says so. How we know explains the marks on the charts. When we’ve got something wrong, tell us. That’s the most useful thing anyone can do for this site.
Who stays private
Living people are all over the Journal: family, friends, and strangers on streets a long way from North Dakota. The ones I keep off the public site are the family’s children. In the public tree a child is a box marked “Private,” with no name, and pictures of a child stay behind the family sign-in unless a parent says otherwise. Nobody living has a birth date on the public site.
When a child grows up, their name appears in the tree. Their childhood pictures are theirs to decide about as an adult. Turning eighteen isn’t the same as saying yes.
If something here is about you and you’d rather it weren’t, it comes down.
Built to last
This site doesn’t live inside a website builder like Squarespace. Underneath, every page is a plain text file and every picture an ordinary one, the kind any computer can open. Everything you see—the fonts, the colors, the maps, the family charts—is laid over those files. The look can be redone from scratch without changing a single fact, and if the company that hosts it closes up shop, the pages can move somewhere else.
The instructions for keeping it are written for family who aren’t technical, and for someone who never met me. The plan is for it to be here for my grandchildren’s grandchildren. That sounds ambitious. The trick is keeping the clever part on the surface and the part that matters plain.